CHAPTER 10 NAMESPACES AND ASSEMBLIES

Private Deployment of an Assembly

Deploying a program on a target machine can be as simple as creating a directory on the machine and copying the application to it. If the application doesn’t need other assemblies (such as DLLs) or if the required DLLs are in the same directory, the program should work just fine where it is. Programs deployed this way are called private assemblies, and this method of deployment is called xcopy deployment.

Private assemblies can be placed in almost any directory and are self-sufficient as long as all the files on which they depend are in the same directory or a subdirectory. In fact, you could have several directories in various parts of the file system, each with the identical set of assemblies, and they would all work fine in their various locations.

Some important things to know about private assembly deployment are the following:

•The directory in which the private assemblies are placed is called the application directory.

•A private assembly can be either strongly named or weakly named.

•There is no need to register components in the registry.

•To uninstall a private assembly, just delete it from the file system.

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